The fantastic growth of the Internet and other computer networks has fueled an equally fantastic growth in the data accessible via these networks. One of the seminal modes for interacting with this data is through the use of hyperlinks within electronic documents.
Hyperlinks are user-selectable elements, such as highlighted text or icons, that link one portion of an electronic document to another portion of the same document or to other documents in a database or computer network. With proper computer equipment and network access, a user can select or invoke a hyperlink and almost instantaneously view the other document, which can be located on virtually any computer system in the world.
Although many hyperlinks are created and inserted into documents manually, recent years have seen development of automated techniques for identifying specific types of document text and linking the identified text using hyperlinks to other related documents. For example, to facilitate legal research, the Westlaw legal research system automatically identifies legal citations and attorney names in text and links the citations to corresponding legal documents in a database and the attorney names to biographical entries in an online directory. For further details, see U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,719 and U.S. Published Patent Application US2003/0135826A1, both of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Although the automated linking technology in the Westlaw system is highly effective for legal citations and names, the present inventors have identified that this technology is not well suited for other types of content, such as medical terms. For example, the inventors recognize that identifying legal citations and entity names within a text is generally simpler than identifying medical terms because terms may function as medical terms in one context and as non-medical terms in another. Legal citations and person names, on the other hand, generally function as legal citations and person names regardless of context.
Accordingly, the present inventors have identified a need for automated methods identifying whether terms are medical terms or non-medical terms.